Claremont Colleges

FOR those of us whose bright college years are a distant memory, a visit to a university campus is tinged with mourning for our lost youth and envy for those fresh-faced things preoccupied with final exams and whether the cute boy down the hall is interested. Alumni of certain local schools may beg to differ, but there is arguably no better place in the Los Angeles area to step into that universe of remembrance and regret than the Claremont Colleges.

Claremont McKenna College on Tuesday announced that it has raised more than $635 million in a fundraising campaign believed to be among the largest for an American liberal arts college. The public campaign was launched in 2008 with a goal of $600 million to support endowed faculty positions, student scholarships, new facilities and building renovations at the small, private college in Claremont, about 35 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. The effort was boosted by gifts from several billionaire alumni, including $200 million from philanthropist Robert Day, $75 million from financier Henry Kravis and $50 million from George R. Roberts, a cousin of Kravis.

As they entered Honnold Library to study one day earlier this month, some students from the Claremont Colleges noticed a typewritten page tacked to a bulletin board. In the weeks since, almost everyone at the six colleges has become aware of--and alarmed by--the message contained on that paper and two identical flyers posted in the library.

A Southern California liberal arts college announced Monday that it has created the Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability, emulating the actor's penchant for combining art, media and environmental science to educate students about policymaking. Pitzer College, one of the first to launch an environmental studies program, teamed up with the actor and devoted preservationist known for his consistent and effective advocacy. The program will combine the school's core values of conservation and sustainability and blend it with its liberal arts and media curriculum.

Pomona College has several reasons for celebrating. It was listed in a recent U. S. News & World Report magazine as one of the top 10 private liberal arts colleges in the country and the only one of the 10 in the West. During the past year it ranked at or near the top in several other academic surveys and was named the standout "cool liberal arts college" by Rolling Stone magazine last March.

Scripps College has launched a $41.4-million campaign to raise funds to finance student aid programs, faculty salaries and endowments and to renovate and construct buildings. Board Chairman Sidney J. Weinberg said approximately $13 million would be set aside for faculty salaries and an equal amount for erecting new buildings and renovating older structures, some of which date to the founding of Scripps in 1926.

The 1928 McKenna Estate in historic Claremont Village takes its name from the George McKenna family, known for its generous support of the Claremont Colleges. The Monterey Revival-style home, designed by Marston & Maybury and built by Clarence Stover, was the site for years of weekly Wednesday night meetings in which students, faculty and area residents met in the wood-paneled library for intellectual debates.

The first signs of turbulence on the serene campuses of the Claremont Colleges were posters--dozens of them plastered in rows on the walls of dining halls, on the outsides of buildings and even on trees. They appeared one February morning, all identical, with a photo of a Pitzer College student and text labeling him as a rapist. This action by a new, secret women's organization led to meetings of angry students who accused the schools of ignoring complaints about date rape.

Dozens of Claremont Colleges students sent each other medically approved Valentines this year: "Condomgrams." The special-delivery prophylactics, tucked inside Valentine cards, had been offered for the last week at the campus dining halls as part of a safe-sex education project organized by student health groups. The cost of sending one through the campus mail, to be delivered today, was 25 cents.

For lovers of rare musical instruments, the Fiske Museum at the Claremont Colleges long has been an astonishing if somewhat mysterious collection. Its 1,200 instruments from around the world include an 18th century Italian mandolin, unusual over-the-shoulder military brasses from the Civil War era, a gourd fiddle from Africa and a 9-foot-long temple trumpet from Tibet.

October 16, 2012 | By Randy Lewis, This post has been corrected. See note below

It's a good bet that a fair amount of homework went undone Monday night for about 3,000 students from five Claremont colleges. Rather than hunkering down over their books, students piled into Pomona College's Bridges Auditorium and spent most of the evening with Taylor Swift, who used the opportunity to tape a new edition of “VH1 Storytellers.” In an unusually smooth television taping - there were few pauses and no stops for retakes -...

Launching a new college would "clearly be a great adventure but so is jumping off a bridge," physicist Joseph B. Platt wrote decades after accepting the challenge in 1956 to become the founding president of Harvey Mudd College in Claremont. Humor was a continual resource for Platt, known for singing silly scientific ditties to teach his students, but so was consensus building. His ability to lead by suggestion helped him place the school "on a road to success," according to George I. McKelvey, director of development when the school opened in 1957.

After moving west from Illinois in 1972, Judy Wright turned into a civic leader and amateur historian whose active role in her community earned her a telling nickname: "Ms. Claremont. " She arrived as a "faculty wife" whose husband taught economics at what is now Claremont Graduate University. She spent more than a decade on the City Council, served as mayor in the 1980s and helped found Claremont Heritage, a group dedicated to preserving local history. Wright, who published two books about Claremont, suffered cardiac arrest New Year's Day and died Jan. 7 at a Pomona hospital, said her husband, Colin Wright.

About two dozen white supremacists took to the streets in Claremont on Saturday to protest what they view as an unbridled flow of illegal immigration into the region, including the small college town. Their demonstration along Foothill Boulevard was interrupted by a counter-protest of more than 200 immigrant rights activists, who decried the group as racist. The screaming confrontation appeared to be tense but nonviolent. Dozens of officers from several police agencies watched over both sides, but Claremont police could not be reached for comment on whether anyone was arrested.

David Alexander Longtime president of Pomona College David Alexander, 77, who brought national standing to Pomona College during a two-decade tenure as president, died Sunday in Claremont after a long battle with cancer, the college announced. Alexander was Pomona president from 1969 to 1991. During that time, the college's endowment grew from $24 million to $296 million and the faculty increased from 130 to 156. He oversaw a campus expansion that added 15 major buildings.

Twenty years ago, they made educational history. The students at Mills College in Oakland revolted against the administration's decision to go coed. The women chanted, they blockaded buildings, they argued their case on television talk shows and they helped produce financial plans for the school's future. And then, surprising even themselves, they won. Sixteen days after the students' strike began, Mills officials reversed course and declared that the undergraduate program would remain just for women — a decision that went against a national trend but is now being commemorated as a wise, if risky, move.

In October, 1888, one hot afternoon we found Claremont entirely grown up to tall weeds, with three inhabited houses, as many more unoccupied buildings, and the big, empty hotel. I sat on the lowest step of the big staircase, waiting and dreading the coming life in these new and desolate surroundings. I wept some hot tears down my baby's neck. --From the journal of Mrs. Edwin Clarence Norton, wife of the first dean of Pomona College.

June 12, 1992 | ELEANOR A. MONTAGUE, Eleanor A. Montague is executive officer of the Council of the Claremont Colleges.

The Claremont Colleges are hardly paradise, but neither are they a hotbed of racism. We are a diverse community that has worked hard for more than a decade to be increasingly inclusive at every level, and to be sensitive to the experience and perspectives of those who make the colleges each year a more varied, vibrant place. While far from perfect, we are making progress.

The trolley doesn't come around here anymore. But when it did, it would arrive three days a week and circle downtown Claremont for 12 hours at a time. Around the apparel shops and gift boutiques, the art galleries and salons, the bakeries and cafes it would roll, stopping to pick up passengers free of charge. The trolley was more bus than streetcar, but it came with enough old-school charm that many hoped it would be an attraction that would increase business revenue and add to the small-town atmosphere of the area known as Claremont Village.